In keeping with the epic conception of reality, the Crusade songs La Chanson d’Antioche and La Conquête de Jérusalem realize the axiological opposition between Good and Evil, embodied in the armies of the Crusaders and the Muslims. However, the appearance of two value systems within one work neutralizes the oppositions, with many of the actions losing their transgressive character. This capacity for neutralization belongs solely to the literary discourse, whereas in medieval realities axiological systems were far from elastic. A distinctive element of the world of the Christians in these texts is the army of King Tafur, which breaks all chivalric rules, hardly a case of transgression this, but rather an incentive for praise and respect. The king’s army constitutes an interesting example of the transference of the warriors’ desires, restricted as they are by the chivalric code.

Key words: Crusade, epic, axiology, religion knighthood.

Gilles de Rais, the Marshal of France — who in 1429 fought beside Joan of Arc in some crucial campaigns during the Hundred Years War (such as the siege of Orléans) — after her burning at the stake in 1431, and after his maternal grand-father’s death the next year, became one of the most cruel and perverted serial murderers, pedophiles and necrophiles in the history of humanity. The paper describes this astonishing transformation that led him from the glorious military achievements to the stake after the controversial trial in Nantes in 1440. The article tries to answer the question if this transgressor (in the common sense of the word), who continues to fascinate people almost six centuries after his death, can also be considered a transgressor according to the criteria proposed by Józef Kozielecki, a Polish psychologist, and the father of psychotransgressionism.

Key words: Transgression, Kozielecki’s psychotransgressionism, Gilles de Rais.

This article proposes to study the theme of moral transgressions in the 18th century slave narratives by such authors as William Snelgrave, Olaudah Equiano, Gabriel Mailhol and Mary Prince. Specifically, it focuses on how these authors take a stand on the theme of evil, understood as both physical and symbolic violence inscribed in the concept of slavery. In the narratives discussed, the slaves become the figures of misfortune (and the victims of the evil), which allows the authors to re-launch the debate on the position of the Other in the French society of the Enlightenment.

Key words: Slave narrative, colonialism of power, (auto)biography, slave trade, postcolonial studies.

This paper is concerned with the relationship between different texts dealing with misanthropy; more precisely, it examines the manifestations of rewritten forms of the story of Molière’s Alceste, by revealing the moral ambiguities inscribed in this character. The selected prose — Rousseau’s Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Gide’s L’Immoraliste, Huysmans’s A rebours, Maupassant’s Un cas de divorce, Kafka’s Le terrier and Le départ — is the focus of this (inter)textual analysis concentrating on text-formatting tools that exhibit special narrative features in the structure of the discussed texts. It is argued that different manifestations of misanthropy — represented by the Natural Man, the Artificial Man and the Absurd Man — are closely connected with textual characteristics.

Key words: Intertextuality, misanthropy, the Natural Man, the Artificial Man, the Absurd Man.

The article investigates into the conflict of virtue and ‘pleasure principle’ in Italo Svevo’s novel La coscienza di Zeno (1923). Throughout his life, the main character of this novel, Zeno Cosini, sees himself confronted with the demand of leading a virtuous life corresponding to the definition given by his social environment. Engaging himself into this project with resolutions which are equally categorical, firm and ready to be turned round to their opposite, more pleasant side, Zeno Cosini denies his inevitable progression on the slippery slope, his resolutions providing the promising basic condition for his various forbidden pleasures, which at the same time allow him to fathom out the borders and limits of good and evil. The more he digresses from his aim, the more he insists on increasingly exacerbated resolutions, for his emphatic obstinacy concerning his project of being “actively virtuous” allows him to indulge more and more in iteratively “last” deviations from his project which is obviously far beyond his possibilites. Nevertheless, Zeno Cosini manages to wash his hands off by making a virtue out of necessity. Thus, strokes of fate (for instance being diagnosed as having a mortal disease) appear to him as a relief or a blessing, and, looking back, he uses his entire life failure as a shelter from further demands of “reason”. In order to justify (also to himself) his recidivous existence, Zeno Cosini pleads the apparent powerlessness of the modern individual in the face of life which appears to him as per se contingent, ambivalent and full of imponderabilities. He thus delegates the moral responsibility to life itself which he judges to be “original”. From this point of view adapted cynically to his needs, Zeno Cosini realizes that what can be conceived as an “illness” is by no means his vice, his recidivism or his bad conscience, but life itself — which can be catered for with a great deal of good will, analyzed and fathomed out conscientiously via transgression — according to him, is nothing but a manifestation of illness — moreover, an incurable and mortal one — for which there is no remedy, but which can at least be truffled with transgressions.

Key words: Transgression, contingency, ambivalence, irony.

This article aims to show how devout Christian novelists, and in particular François Mauriac, exploited the theme of evil in order to justify their religious convictions. Such evil, often identified with pleasures of the flesh, can be interpreted as self-indulgent — the protagonists are yearning for any kind of freedom and hence enable these writers (their creators) to uphold their theory. Literary works by François Mauriac, therefore, belong to the category of “committed literature,” with their author becoming God’s advocate who must be exempted from evil.

Key words: God, evil, sin, flesh, salvation.

Transgression is everywhere in Les Âmes fortes. It is present in the form of the narrative in which two opposite versions of events question the very notion of truth and well-established moral norms of judgement. As the novel of the impossible truth, Les Âmes fortes highlights the power of fiction, of lies, and of manipulation. Moral virtues are inverted in two opposite versions of the events: when generosity is increasingly showed, does it become a mark of ferocity and pride, a means of domination, or an aspect of the superior art of loosing? The Biblical values are constantly profaned in this complex novel: numerous Biblical references are quoted only to be perverted immediately afterwards. For example, in one of the two versions of her own story, one of the protagonists, Therese, manages to reach sanctity in evil, which enables her to assert her absolute domination — the main feature of the strong souls, the “âmes fortes”.

Key words: Transgression, profanation, manipulation, perversion, illusion.

In 1955 Georges Bataille published two books on art : Manet located the origin of modernism in Manet’s work, while the other, Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art, located the birth of humanity in the cave paintings of Lascaux, the first known example of prehistoric cave painting. Discovered in 1940, the cave came to represent, for many intellectuals of the post-war years, the origin of humanity as well as the origin of art. This article problematizes the notion of transgression in its relation to aesthetics and aesthetic creation in Bataille’s writings on Lascaux, exploring his developments on alteration, transfiguration, uselesness and “the inform”. For Bataille, the paintings in the cave became the symbol of the origin of art as the origin of transgression, as well as the idea of the origin as transgression itself.

Key words: Georges Bataille, Lascaux, transgression, cave painting, art, alteration.

The identification of evil with the ocularcentrism of western civilization constitutes one of the leitmotifs of French theory. In words of Martin Jay, it results in a “denigration of vision” in the twentieth-century thought. This paper analyses only one form of this campaign against the visual evil, one related to the motif of the gouged, or enucleated, eye, as it appears in some literary and visual works of the authors from outside the surrealist circle. The study contains reflections on Georges Bataille’s early writings, as well as on works by Alberto Giacometti and Man Ray, and on one passage from Michel Leiris’s Manhood.

Key words: Eye, Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Alberto Giacometti, Man Ray.

The incentive for this essay was “Le retour de Sade” (“The Return of de Sade”), a play by Bernard Noël put on in Paris and Nancy in 2005. The play shows Marquis resurrected by Madame d’Avilla, in the orders of a woman pope who ascends St. Peter’s Throne. De Sade is highly convinced that his descent on the Earth results from his perfectibility in evil and is the proof of his post-mortem triumph. The pope, however, wants to engage him as a court jester because his books are no longer believed to be monstrosities that de Sade thinks they still are. The analysis of De Sade’s resurrection leads to a discussion of Bataille’s concept of eroticism seen as a transgressive act which dispels prohibitions without suppressing them. Referring to Bataille’s essay “The Use of Value of D.A.F de Sade” from 1930, this paper also tries to determine the position of Bataille — a classic French writer whose œuvre was published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, which is considered to be a major sign of recognition for an author in France — in contemporary western culture. The questions that this study attempts to answer are whether Bataille still plays the role of a transgressor and to what extent the transgressive value of Bataille’s eroticism is still attainable in the light of the Foucauldian concept of Power/Knowledge which is inherent in the discourse of sexuality.

Key words: Pornography, eroticism, sexuality, transgression.

Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean author who passed away in 2003, tackles the problem of evil using a criminal convention which underwent profound changes in the second half of the 20th century. One of its most popular types nowadays is the metaphysical detective story, in which the investigation is complicated by various cognitive riddles reflecting the Postmodernist intellectual disputes. Bolaño’s last novel — which is the subject of this article — is titled 2666 and was published in 2004. It is a metaphysical detective story set in Northern Mexico which focuses on the country’s current social problems. In the novel, crime and evil are not a metaphor for the human intellectual cognition, as they are tightly connected with the political injustice that main characters experience on a day to day basis.

Key words: Postmodern fiction, Spanish-American fiction, detective genre, the evil.

The book Occhio per occhio by Sandro Veronesi is an important voice in the ongoing discussion on death penalty. First published in 1992 in the form of an essay, it was republished in 2004 as a prose narrative. Veronesi combines journalistic style with narrative fiction and thus reaches a the wide range of readers. The key word to the analysed text is “transgression.” Veronesi shows four countries which represent four sides of the world as well as very different political and cultural systems. He shows similar mechanisms of violation of certain norms and laws in these countries. The title of his work, which refers to the Biblical law of retaliation, clearly determines the position of the author who sees death penalty as a tool of revenge. Veronesi does not speak to the reader from the position of a detached theoretician, but as a man who personally experienced the tragedy of people affected by death penalty. For the reason that the author assumes a definitive position in the discussion and refers to a general concept of human nature, his novel arouses emotions and evokes controversies.

Key words: Death penalty, human rights, transgression, the right to retaliate, contemporary Italian Prose.

The Adversary, a narrative by Emmanuel Carrère, based on a sordid and disconcerting true story, revolves around an act of transgression — that of Jean-Claude Romand who, after deceiving his relatives for 18 years into thinking that he was a renowned doctor, killed all his family when the truth about his life was about to come out into the open. Carrère, in identifying Romand with the “Adversary” (i.e. with Satan) proposes a metaphysical, moral, social, as well as literary reading of transgression. The combination of deception with murder not only causes the irruption of evil in apparently peaceful lives, but it also challenges language itself, as well as writing which has to deal with a man both monstrously other and monstrously familiar. So, looking at it more closely, it seems that the explosion of transgression in The Adversary is to be read more as an anxious consciousness of the flimsiness of the boundaries than as the latter being called into question.

Key words: Emmanuel Carrère, transgression, evil, identity.

The néofantastique (neo-fantasy) literature abounds in representations of transgressions, be it moral, religious, and social. This literary genre often deals with crimes, pornography, cannibalism, necrophilia, etc. Because the new fantasy literature breaks various cultural taboos, many critics perceive it as a genre liberal par excellence. However, there are also conservative, or didactic, works inscribed in the genre in which all transgressions are punished by the death of the transgressor. This study analyzes this ambiguity of the néofantastique on the basis of a number of short stories in the French language by various Belgian and French authors.

Key words: Fantasy literature, new fantasy, (néo)fantastique, transgression, taboo, fear, ambiguity, short fiction, the uncanny.

The article analyses the representations of Fez and Tanger in the fiction by Tahar Ben Jelloun. It proves that the contrast between these two cities, presented in his many works, illustrates antagonisms in the Moroccan society after 1956. The autobiographical thread of the way from Fez (the city of Norm) to Tanger (the city of Transgression), which emerges in such works as Harrouda (1973), L’Écrivain public (1983), Jour de silence à Tanger (1990), La Nuit de l’Erreur (1997), Sur ma Mère (2008), includes the issue of the writer’s political engagement and his objection to anachronistic social and moral norms. Tahar Ben Jelloun’s fiction, which is concentrated on the antinomy Fez — Tanger, becomes the area of difficult experience of freedom based on the symbolic breaking off with the father who symbolises restrictive tradition.

Key words: The Moroccan society in 1950—1970, socio-political contestation, autobiographical literature, Fez, Tanger.

Barbara Gowdy’s 1996 novel Mister Sandman centers on the mysteriously silent figure of Joan Cannary, a mentally disabled child who yet does not become a spectacle of the grotesque in the mode quite standard for representations of the disabled female figures, as Rosemarie Garland Thomson noticed in her magisterial study Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. In her disability Gowdy’s Joan does not constitute a metaphor of the condition of her family, either, despite the transgressions they are prone to devote themselves to. The novel offers an open-minded outlook on transgression as a means of liberating oneself from the social constraints and from the self-imposed limitations. Joan’s eternal girlhood makes her a lens for the family members’ tendency to transgress against the norms, which is ultimately received with affirmation. Her figure offers a valuable commentary on other texts by Gowdy, which present a discourse on the liminality of human body and on the boundaries of identity.

Key words: Barbara Gowdy, Canadian novel in English, disability, body, gender.

The general aim of this paper is to analyse the ways in which the concept of “transgression” loses its negative connotations in queer and feminist interpretations of the Biblical narrative of the Original Sin. In the course of this analysis, “transgression” ceases to be the indication of evil and sin, and starts to represent the possibility of transformation, redefinition, and rebellion. The theoretical part of the article focuses on the feminist reading of the Biblical Creation Myth and ponders the meaning of shame experienced by Adam and Eve in the aftermath of their sin. It also indicates the parallels between the concepts of “shame” and “queerness,” which comparison, in turn, allows for a redefinition of the notion of “transgression.” The subsequent part of the text constitutes an interpretation of Lorna Crozier’s poem titled “Original Sin.” In her revision Crozier subverts the binary logic of the Garden by means of evoking the character of Lilith as well as Aristophanes’ myth of the origins of human kind. The purpose of the proposed reading is to show that through queering the Biblical story, Crozier de-shames the Biblical Eve, and undermines the Biblical depiction of her sin. The last part of the paper focuses on an analysis of Crozier’s poem “What I Gave You Truly” in which Eve’s confession becomes the narrative of transgression.

Key words: Transgression, shame, feminist theory, queer theory, Lorna Crozier.

Leopoldo María Panero is a modern Spanish poet and a member of the Novísimos group. Critics have often labeled him insane, transgressive and cursed. His mental illness, schizophrenia, makes him one of the most controversial Spanish poets and grants him a unique vision of reality. Culture and society generate and develop rules, limits and prohibitions which every member of a given society is obligated to obey. In Panero’s writing morality is likened to a constraint which the poet transgresses. This article concentrates on one of the most important issues in Panero’s writing, namely, transgressive sexuality (with its socially unacceptable forms, such as incest or necrophilia). What is more, by using the most significant ideas of Georges Bataille, Sigmund Freud or Antoni Kępiński, this paper ponders on whether madness is enough to

Key words: Leopoldo María Panero, modern Spanish poetry, sexuality, schizophrenia, transgression.

Vincenzo Consolo, in one of his interviews, said that painting is counterbalance to style in his artistic work. In fact, the fine art is a frequent motif appearing in his works. The novel titled L’olivo e l’olivastro is a great example of this kind of narration since one of the chapters depicts Caravaggio’s stay in Siracusa, as well as the consequences of this fruitful visit. Taking into account the way an olive and a wild olive sprout from the same trunk, so as to be the symbol of everything that is cultivated and what is wild, it should be noted that in the same way the heroes in Caravaggio’s paintings have the features that characterize both human beings and animals. This split is present constantly in artistic work of Caravaggio who broke the cardinal rules set out in painting. As a result, he was called both a scandalmonger and the author of the first painting transgression, as well as a highly provocative artist. Vincenzo Consolo’s prose is thought-provoking and encourages reflection on relativity of goodness and beauty in the real world which is depicted as disappointing.

Key words: Painting, escape, transgression, exaggeration, relativity.

The article looks at the representations of corporeality, desire and transgression in selected films by David Cronenberg, Guy Maddin and Bruce LaBruce. The body acquires some kind of independence in these films, and the forces of excess that work in/though it (drives, desires) push the modern subject into various acts of transgression, thus threatening its propriety and stability. At a cultural level, this phenomenological instability of body- and self-boundaries may be linked to the Canadian sense of a “weak” national identity, rephrased by some as a positive case of “queer” nationality.

Key words: Body, desire, sexuality, transgression, excess, queer, Canadian cinema.